Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall - Review

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Vera M. Kutzinski

Heather Hathaway. Caribbean Waves. Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. 200 pp. $29.95.

Published in Indiana's Blacks in the Diaspora series, Caribbean Waves is a book that promises more than it delivers. Hathaway seeks to "reconsider the plurality of black American culture" by focusing on the literary works of Jamaican Claude McKay and Paule Marshall, of Bajan extraction. Their West Indian affiliations notwithstanding, both authors are frequently identified as part of African America on course syllabi and in academic scholarship. By contrasting a first-generation with a second-generation immigrant writer, Hathaway offers some useful correctives to theories that traditional immigration scholars have advanced about melting-pot effects and intergenerational differences in non-black U.S. immigration communities. She argues convincingly in favor of immigrant Caribbean writers' (and texts') dual cultural affiliations, showing how monolithic constructions of "black America" inhibit our understanding of the complex processes of identity formation that occur when U.S. racial binarisms are imposed on no n-white displaced individuals and communities.

Investigations of "difference within racial sameness" are the inevitable result of placing African American Studies within transnational, especially inter-American, contexts, and they are becoming increasingly important to reshaping that field by carrying it beyond strategic essentialisms. There is no question that Hathaway's "pointed cross-cultural reconsideration" of both McKay's "alienation" and Marshall's "interconnectedness" is a timely project, but it is one far too narrowly conceived--and I am not just lamenting its tendency to make the anglophone Caribbean represent all the different islands and rimlands. While Hathaway's study tacitly participates in this practice, its narrowness is more a function of accounting for too little, even of that tradition of Caribbean writing.

Much of the book's unrealized potential becomes apparent in its brief Afterword, which is by far the most exciting part of Caribbean Waves. Here, Hathaway sketches several possibilities for what this book might (and should) have been had it, for instance, included other Afro-Caribbean writers such as Eric Walrond, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan, or even attended to work by more recent migrants such as Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff, perhaps along with poets such as Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, both of whom also reside in the United States. Other constructive comparisons (of a different sort) might have been drawn between McKay and Langston Hughes, or between McKay and Jean Toomer. Last but not least, many useful questions might be asked about so-called ethnic writing in the United States through considerations of Leslie Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston and Richard Rodriguez, all of whom Hathaway herself mentions. But neither Hathaway nor her editors heeded the sound advice of at least one of her manuscri pt's readers (see 173n1), missing this, and other, opportunities to turn her dissertation into a strong book.

The possibilities for an exciting comparative project on this topic are endless, and I do not suggest that Hathaway should have included every single one of the writers mentioned above. But she should have included some of them to move her book more decisively beyond the body of critical work that already exists on Marshall and, especially, on McKay. Had she added only Walrond, Lorde, or Jordan to her list of literary figures, she would have deepened her study considerably. But, as it stands, Hathaway rarely goes beyond the easy thematics of cultural alienation and connectedness, and her approach to select poetry and fiction remains largely biographical. In their present form, Hathaway's thematically oriented close readings, with their overriding concern with sociological and psychological realism, have little to add to the work of critics such as

Barbara Christian, Hortense Spillers, Kimberly Benston, and Wayne Cooper. The only partial exception is Hathaway's reading of Marshall's Daughters in chapter 5, but even this reading would have benefited from some consideration of the writings of Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.

While Hathaway's dual affiliation argument is fascinating in its implications for New World literary history (on which she expounds far too briefly in her first chapter, on the 1926 "Special Caribbean Issue" of Charles Johnson's journal Opportunity), her two case studies neither adequately historicize her argument nor develop fully at least some of the theoretical issues that the Afterword so eloquently raises. To be sure, posing questions is integral to all successful intellectual work, but one cannot stop there.